Well, I learned a lesson lat night, I guess. In my mind it's always been about tradeoffs. With hosted Exchange, I was thinking these were the choices:
1. 1&1, or others like them. Big provider of service. Low price. Not so great technical support but at least they're big and I wouldn't be vulnerable to things falling through the cracks if "the guy" wasn't around at a given time. 2. Intermedia, Rackspace, or others like them. Big provider of service. High price. Set minimum number of mailboxes. Great technical support. No vulnerabilities, as long as I'm willing to pay 2x or 3x or 4x (or even up to 8x) for approximately the same Exchange service. 3. Webville, or others like them. Very small provider of service. Low price. Makes me and my clients vulnerable if "the guy" isn't around at a given time. Well, I was wrong. While #2 and #3 are valid, #1 was a myth! Turns out at 1&1 "the guy" was out for two weeks on Christmas vacation. I didn't know that. 1&1's level 1 support didn't know that. So my problem sat unanswered, with no apparent process to handle "the guy" being out, for two weeks. And to add insult to injury, here is the response from "the guy" (who is a good guy, by the way; nonetheless this is a not-unexpected but completely unsatisfactory answer): "Unfortunately i have to tell you, that the Problem here is your Palm with it's "VersaMail"-Application. We have seen numerous problems with that over the last months. As we have seen before this may be fixed by Palm with a new Release. But we can not guarantee this. So far we can only recommend to not use Palm devices with our Exchange Servers." I am going to switch to Webville.net (Exchangehostingservice.com) and try that out; today hopefully. It is run, managed, and supported by "the guy", but "the guy" has already spent more time with me helping to diagnose the calendar problem than 1&1, the company I and my clients are currently paying, has. "The guy" also has "backup guy" who he consciously chose to work with to handle things if "the guy" is out. So, the very small provider also does a better job of ensuring that things don't fall through the cracks than 1&1 Internet, the largest web hosting company in the world! Basic message from me now is the same as that of many, many other people out there: Beware 1&1's Exchange service! Will continue to update you, for those who care! I'm bcc'iing "the guy" to know what's being said. Not sending out his email address to the group at this point in case he'd prefer that people look at his site, http://www.webville.net, rather than emailing him directly with pre-sales things. With any luck, this problem will disappear with Webville's service. Sandy said good things about Webville with Chatteremail. I'll be using the Centro version of Versamail 3.5, so we'll see if it works! If not, I will be at a crossroads. Interesting things happen at crossroads, but I have enough interesting things going on right now, thankyouverymuch! Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Don Ferguson Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 11:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Treo] Hosted Exchange update - and question I'll try. Let's say I have a recurring appointment on my calendar. All snug on the Centro, in Outlook and, of course, on the Exchange server. Now, I change an occurrence - either by moving one occurrence to another date/time, or changing All Future occurrences to something else. I do this all the time. Fortunately for me, the Palm calendar can do this, and until Christmas, the changed recurring appointment showed up just fine in Exchange and in Outlook. Then, BANG! What happens now is that the last non-changed occurrence of the recurring appointment shows up with an alarm, and when I try to dismiss the alarm, I get a message saying it can't dismiss it because it can't find the recurrence information. The only way to dismiss the window is to close it, and the alarm shows up again, each time another alarm sounds. The appointment no longer shows up in the Outlook calendar grid - not one single occurrence of the recurring appointment. The appointment still shows up as it should in OWA and on the Centro, but the only way I can get rid of the constantly popping up alarm in Outlook is to DELETE the entire recurring event. Not good, since I lose all past occurrence information about the recurring appointment - something I use for historical record keeping. Or at least I used to. If I change the occurrence in Outlook or in OWA, this doesn't happen, but there's a nasty feature / bug / characteristic in Outlook (been there since OL97) wherein if you change a recurring appointment you lose ALL exception information - the entire recurrence pattern - past, present and future - gets reset to whatever you change it to. This also is not good for me, since the exceptions to the recurrence pattern carry information I need, but lose. Up until Christmas, I neatly side-stepped this "feature" by using the Palm calendar to make such changes, penalty-free. Now, it's worse even than Outlook since I lose EVERYTHING about a recurring appointment. No joy here. And 1&1 has STILL not responded to me in any way. It's been 11 days. I am not happy, but I haven't found an alternative provider that offers the performance/price performance of 1&1. Granted, the numerator of that equation is rapidly going down, so I'm willing to pay more for a better alternative, but not as much as, say, Rackspace and some others charge. I'm a one man show, and many of my clients are small enough and frugal enough that they don't want to pay 2x or 3x or 4x (or in one case 10x) what they're paying 1&1. I'm just very very disappointed by this atrocious lack of service, and I've lost a great deal of information from my calendar already. . . Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Motzing Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 2:41 PM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Treo] Hosted Exchange update - and question Thanks for providing that info. In summary, can you describe the nasty problem? ----------------------- Sent from my Treo(r) smartphone -----Original Message----- From: "Don Ferguson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tuesday, Jan 8, 2008 8:30 am Subject: RE: [Treo] Hosted Exchange update - and question To: <[email protected]>Reply-To: [email protected] Haven't left yet. Right now I'm experiencing a nasty problem with the Outlook calendar. The issue for me isn't so much the problem, but their response to it - basically zero in the past 12 days, even though I've sent them 1) the initial problem report, 2) a 12-page detailed problem report complete with screen shots, 3) four followup emails roughly evenly spaced over the last 12 days; and called them twice. I'll keep y'all posted. The developer of Chatteremail said, way back when, that 1&1 sucked. He was focused on their 'crappy implementation if IMAP', but the concept certainly extends to their approach to technical/customer support. Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Motzing Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 11:58 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Treo] Hosted Exchange update - and question Don, I missed it, what, specifically made you leave 1&1. I.e. The problem you wanted support for? Thanks. I've been considering going with 1&1. ----------------------- Sent from my Treo(r) smartphone -----Original Message----- From: 'Don Ferguson' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Monday, Jan 7, 2008 11:31 pm Subject: RE: [Treo] Hosted Exchange update - and question To: <[email protected]>Reply-To: [email protected] Interesting - that's a new one to me, and they have more information on their web site about how it actually *works* than I've found on all the other sites combined. I'll have to call them and go through my basic questions, but this may be an alternative, thanks! Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sandy Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 11:06 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Treo] Hosted Exchange update - and question I'm using Webville with Chatter. I went to them when I was using the 750, left when I switched to the 755p. When I returned to the 750, I returned to Webville again and received the same excellent service as I did the first time around. I have since returned to the 755p because AT&T stopped working at locations I needed, but decided to stay with Webville. I'm using it with Chatter and it works great. -- Sandy ________________________________ From: Don Ferguson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:44:21 -0500 To: <[email protected]> Conversation: [Treo] Hosted Exchange update Hi all you Treo/Centro people! Happy New Year! As those of you paying attention know by now, I've been using 1&1 Internet's hosted Exchange offering for over a year now. The funcation of this with Versamail, especially on the Centro, is really very productive. While 1&1's Exchange service has been generally good, their support is the worst I've ever seen in any company anywhere. They make Sprint look like Airborne Express in the good days. After hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of research online and on the phone with several providers, I'm still somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. It just seems that there isn't much in the way of objective (or even subjective) reviews out there to facilitate meaningful comparison and selection. So, I'm looking around, and wonder if this august group might offer some recommendations for alternatives, if any, that have pleased you. Cheers, Don [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
